I have recently chosen exhibition catalogue as books of the year, honouring a neglected genre. This year catalogues have tended to be substitutes for the original show, rather than souvenirs. I didn’t ...

In his introduction to this collection of essays and reviews Jamie McKendrick is at pains to explain the philosophy behind his writings, and the fact of ...

Library renewals The heroic story of the men who saved thousands of manuscripts from being destroyed by al-Qaeda ...

Of books about Venice there seems to be no end, but few offer significant new insights. One that does is Ronnie Ferguson’s Venetian Inscriptions: ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...

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Paris was never really Camus’s cup of tea, and certainly not when, newly arrived there in the spring of 1940, he was living in a drab hotel room in Montmartre and doing humdrum secretarial work at the ...

When I was a child I wanted to be a cartographer. I drew maps of my surroundings – bedroom, home, neighbourhood, city, country, continent – with “Here be ...

The expression “Don’t get me wrong” is a good place to start – an ethical mandate as well as a critic’s dictum. In its efforts to enforce informality while insisting on the possibility of estrangement ...

When the prospect of an edition of Ted Hughes’s letters arose, Seamus Heaney wrote to Carol, Hughes’s widow, with some advice. “A hefty volume done with ...

In the early 1980s, as the final round of Cold War conflicts raged across the globe, I met Martha Gellhorn, the celebrated war correspondent. Intrigued, I began to explore her collected works. I found ...

The history of the book does not always involve the study of either history or books. As James Raven shows in this slim, engaging volume, the question of what sort of object might count as a book ...